Cosy, comic tragedy told with humour and grace
What used to be known as social comedy, or the comedy of manners, went out of style around the time we stopped speaking of “society” as an elite class identifiable by their breeding and refined sense of protocol.
Of course we still have the 1 per cent — the rich are always with us — but we don’t think of today’s plutocrats or rich kids of Instagram as characterized by good manners, or embodying any sort of social code.
French Exit, which announces itself as a “tragedy of manners,” is thus a throwback novel in the retro-ironic mode. The tragedy is that of falling, or downward mobility.
Frances Price, the acerbic widow of a one of the highest-paid lawyers in the U.S., has been living beyond her means in a stately brownstone on New York City’s Upper East Side.
Faced with a financial reckoning and unable to contemplate a lifestyle other than what she’s become accustomed, she flees to Paris with her dependent adult son Malcolm and a cat that she thinks contains the spirit of her deceased husband.
As with the social comedy of any period, most of the humour comes out of our sense that the main characters aren’t quite the same as the rest of us, that they are not, as one exasperated ambassador from reality says here, “normal people.”
Their world is no less alien, having that same feeling of golden days gone by. Cellphones don’t seem to be much in use in French Exit and nobody mentions the internet.
The ocean crossing isn’t by plane, but by cruise ship. We might be back in the original Gilded Age, and not its contemporary second coming.
Patrick deWitt, who won the 2011 Governor-General’s Award for The Sisters Brothers (the movie version is out this fall) has become a reliable source for recommended reading, and he gives the story here all the requisite notes of humour and grace, turning the tale of two unsympathetic victims of affluenza into a cosy comedy about the importance of family, love and money, not in that order.